THERE ARE FIVE PRIMARY stakeholders to whom we express our most caring hospitality, and in whom we take the greatest interest. Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principal for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company:
- Our employees
- Our guests
- Our community
- Our suppliers
- Our investors
As any rational businessman would, I’d like our restaurants to earn a handsome profit and ultimately create a sustainable return for our investors. In the model of enlightened hospitality, only after you have first taken good care of your top four stakeholders will you be able to take care of your fifth group—your investors—and provide them with a sound and enduring return on their investment. To
prioritize differently breaks the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality and seriously compromises the chances that your business will achieve excellence, success, good will, and soul.
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Why do we care for our stakeholders in this particular order? The interests of our own employees must be placed directly ahead of those of our guests because the only way we can consistently earn raves, win repeat business, and develop bonds of loyalty with our guests is first to ensure that our own team members feel jazzed about coming to work. Being jazzed is a combination of feeling motivated, enthusiastic, confident, proud, and at peace with the choice to work on our team. I place the interests of our investors fifth, but not because I don’t want to earn a lot of money. On the contrary, I staunchly believe that standing conventional business priorities on their head ultimately leads to even greater, more enduring financial success. And, just as important, it’s the kind of success that adds tangible value to the lives of a wide range of stakeholders. As business or organizational logic, enlightened hospitality can be applied far beyond the restaurant industry.
Suppose that you care for your investors’ interests first.
You can then potentially make a speedier financial hit for them, but it’s not as likely to sustain itself over time. There will inevitably be a revolving door of staff members who, finding themselves in a business culture that does not place
their own or the customers’ interests ahead of the other key stakeholders, will quickly cease to feel particularly proud, motivated, or enthusiastic about coming to work. By contrast, prioritizing our way has enabled us to offer investors an opportunity to affiliate with a business known for outstanding employees, warm hospitality, strong ties with exceptional suppliers, and a solid commitment to playing an active, valuable role in its community. And we believe those investors are also delighted to be affiliated with the consequent quality of our restaurants, themselves.
Our investors (as well as our other four stakeholders) also trust that I am not going to affiliate any of our restaurants with any other brand that would diminish ours. For example, it was a simple decision for us when we had a chance to affiliate with a company like Timberland. That is an exceptional organization whose products exemplify enduring quality, whose employees are outstanding, and whose community-building culture is impressive and inspiring. It was natural to choose Timberland as the supplier for Blue Smoke’s staff uniforms as well as the merchandise we sell, like Blue Smoke baseball caps and T- shirts.
We don’t have many outside investors in our restaurants
—most of the investors have been family members, close friends, or colleagues. We’ve been fortunate that those we have attracted are stimulating people who bring broad experience, fascinating perspectives, and strength of character to the table—all with a supportive mind-set.
We’re blessed to have such investors, who take a genuine interest in sharing the financial risk upfront while offering their abundant wisdom through the duration of their investment. Few things make me prouder than when a
restaurant begins to make profit distributions to its investors.
I make sure that every investor knows going in that enlightened hospitality is a business model designed for long-term, sustained profitability. It’s not a recipe for overnight distributions or instant riches. It is inherently expensive to design high-quality restaurants that are built to become institutions, and then to operate them with a long view. While our investors are willing to be patient upfront, they do rightfully expect a healthy long-term return on their investment and we feel a solemn responsibility to deliver it. And since I personally invest in each one of our businesses, all of our interests are aligned.
In a private entrepreneurial (and nonliquid) investment— unlike a typical stock market play—investors aren’t simply looking for a strong return; they’re also making a bet on an affiliation with the overall principles of the company.
By prioritizing our five stakeholder groups in this way, we have been able to build loyalty where it most counts. The long-term success of our business is determined by, and intrinsically linked to, the degree to which we excel at taking care of these stakeholders’ respective interests.
THE FIVE STAKEHOLDERS IN ENLIGHTENED HOSPITALITY
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Employees
When I first walk into any restaurant or any business, I can immediately guess what type of experience I’m in for by sensing whether the staff members appear to be focused on their work, supportive of one another, and enjoying one another’s company. If they are out to help one another
succeed, I know I stand an excellent chance of having an excellent experience accompanied by a feeling of welcome. From any business, what better outcome is there than that? People who like to please others tend to do so with many, if not all, constituencies.
Well before our staff members can extend any kind of meaningful hospitality to our guests, they need to first understand the primary importance of being on each other’s side. Mutual respect and trust are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field. And the most talented employees are often those attracted to companies that can provide them with the most important job benefit of all: other great people with whom to work.
Considering that most of us spend about one-third of our lives at work, it is the value of the human experience we have with our colleagues—what we learn from one another, how much fun we have working together, and how much mutual respect and trust we share—that has the greatest influence on job satisfaction.
When I talk about the staff caring for each other, I stress that it’s incumbent upon all members of our team to be citizens of our company and to come to work looking for opportunities to be on one another’s side.
The restaurant business can be grueling. When you are the expediter in the kitchen, you may have thirty-five “dupes” (guest checks) staring you in the face, each of which needs to be cooked “on the fly.” That means trying to send appetizers out to thirty-five tables, coordinating dishes from the sauté station, the pasta station, the grill station, and the salad station. Waiters are running in and out of the kitchen asking for an update on table 26’s food and telling
you that table 28 needs its main courses in order to make a theater curtain. And the kitchen is hot, with up to thirty people racing around while performing tough tasks in tight quarters. It’s tense.
Under those circumstances our people need to remember that the best, most efficient way to work through all the dupes is first to take care of one another and work together as a team. Does working together take more effort than screaming and yelling—a more common practice in restaurant kitchens? Not especially. But the results of respectful collaboration build long-term success and prevent the same problems from recurring every day. I love to hear waiters asking one another, “Is there anything I can do to help you with table 41? Can I help carry any of these plates out?” When there is abundant mutual respect and trust, and people are continually looking for opportunities to help one another, that infectious spirit becomes the culture. That reciprocally uplifting feeling then translates into a better product because managers help waiters, waiters help cooks, cooks help waiters, and cooks help cooks. If a waiter is “in the weeds” (restaurant-speak for “up shit creek”), there is invariably a waitress one or two stations away who is for the moment in control of her station, and able to offer help.
What I never want to see is a cook getting short with the expediter, or the expediter getting short with a waiter, or any other such combination. Guests can definitely pick up on and, I think, even taste discord among employees, even if it’s taking place offstage, in the kitchen.
Yet our employees don’t come to work just because our “culture of hospitality” resonates with them and feels good. They have to pay the rent, too. It is critical to me that our wage scales be competitive with those of other restaurants, and that we provide the finest benefits we can afford,
including medical and dental insurance for all our full-time employees.
The primary reason we have such a loyal and dedicated staff (in a fickle industry notorious for high turnover), is that we understand what people want most from their workplace is to respect and be respected. And it certainly helps to know that their honest day’s work—mistakes and all—is appreciated. We try to find opportunities to express our respect in many ways.
Just as we invite our customers to give us feedback on comment cards, we also conduct periodic roundtable discussions with each restaurant’s staff, during which we invite employees to provide honest feedback about how they feel our business is performing.
We also conduct a monthly dining-voucher program for all staff members with at least three months’ tenure that allows them to dine at any of our restaurants using a credit. The catch is that in exchange for the credit, employees must answer a detailed questionnaire about their dining experience. Why do we prize—even need—the input of our own employees? Better than almost anyone else, they understand the mission of our restaurants, and they are in the best position to react to and measure our actual performance against our ideal outcome. They are expert at observing their colleagues in the dining room, tasting the food they know so well, and assessing the restaurant’s overall performance. They get to observe and be on the receiving end of the consistent, unifying power of hospitality throughout all our restaurants. They see that each sibling restaurant is staffed by “51 percenters” who have the same excellent technical and emotional skills for which they themselves were hired.
It’s especially useful for us to hear and read where improvement is needed, from insiders who are on our side. This is certainly preferable to first learning about a problem from a critic whose megaphone reaches an enormous audience. Above all, the program sends our own team a crucial message: “We respect, trust, and care enough about you to actively seek and value your input.” And we put our dining dollars where our mouths are.
We’ve also asked our staff members to periodically participate in a questionnaire created by our human resources department: our “Walk the Talk Survey.” This offers them a chance to tell us how we’re doing as leaders and managers. It’s a remarkably instructive report card that provides illuminating, challenging, uplifting, and occasionally discouraging results. When you take the risk of telling your staff what your company stands for and what’s nonnegotiable, and then give them a mirror to hold up, they are delighted to reflect an accurate picture. For example, we’ve learned about managers who weren’t effective listeners or who didn’t seem to consistently inspire standards of excellence. We’ve heard that a restaurant’s management has fallen behind on repairs and maintenance, sending out a message that perhaps we don’t take enough pride in the facility. And we’ve also picked up clues that the degree to which a restaurant is subscribing to the tenets of enlightened hospitality is flagging. That encourages me to take an even closer look at how well management is or isn’t investing in our staff.
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Guests
Hospitality starts with the genuine enjoyment of doing something well for the purpose of bringing pleasure to other people. Whether that’s an attitude, a behavior, or an innate trait, it should become a primary motivation for coming to
work every day. We strive to treat our guests the way we would want to be treated. The golden rule remains as fresh and meaningful as ever; and beyond how well it serves people in their lives, it may also be the most potent business strategy ever devised. In business, as in life, you get what you give. We try to apply a humanitarian viewpoint to every business challenge, to find creative, gracious solutions and reassure our guests that we are solidly on their side.
Our front line in delivering on our promise of hospitality is our team of telephone reservationists. I consider the initial dialogue so crucial to our business that for years the path to becoming a manager at Union Square Cafe began with being a reservationist. Answering our reservation telephone lines remains an excellent proving ground for this business: when a reservationist can maintain composure under the non-stop volume of calls taking place on the telephone and still be an agent of hospitality—all without the benefit of eye contact or smiles—that’s a strong indicator that he or she has the right stuff to advance in the hospitality profession.
In the course of their calls, our reservationists must continuously listen to themselves and ask: am I being perceived by this caller as an agent or a gatekeeper? An agent makes things happen for others. A gatekeeper sets up barriers to keep people out. We’re looking for agents.
In every business, there are employees who are the first point of contact with the customers (attendants at airport gates, receptionists at doctors’ offices, bank tellers, executive assistants). Those people can come across either as agents or as gatekeepers. An agent makes things happen for others. A gatekeeper sets up barriers to keep people out. We’re looking for agents,
and our staff members are responsible for monitoring their own performance: In that transaction, did I present myself as an agent or a gatekeeper? In the world of hospitality, there’s rarely anything in between.
It’s not an easy job. At most of our restaurants, as many as four out of five callers on any given day don’t end up with the exact time they initially wanted for a reservation.
Whether a reservationist is in an office or at the host’s desk, most calls present opportunities to make callers feel that we genuinely care about them—or that we don’t. This exchange also gives callers, free of charge, an excellent preview of how they might expect to be treated at our restaurants.
Reservationists are under heavy pressure because they can’t control how many people call; but they’re trained to maintain a hospitable composure no matter how many calls come in and no matter how quickly the calls come. The true test of a win-win dialogue with an agent is that somebody who does not get the exact time or date he or she wanted nevertheless leaves the call convinced that we tried. One year, among its highly complimentary comments about Union Square Cafe, the Zagat Survey quoted a participant: “The reservationists even feel badly when they can’t accommodate you.” That made me very proud.
Gatekeepers for very busy restaurants often say things like, “We’re fully committed,” or, “All we have is six or ten o’clock in the evening,” without expressing genuine regret or suggesting an option like placing the person’s name on an active waiting list. The hospitality door is slammed shut. Many callers, conditioned to expect such experiences, assume we’re all gatekeepers who are somehow bent on keeping them out. As a result, they have learned that the best way to get what they want is to be pushy and nasty
from the get-go. That has never been an effective strategy, since someone who is impolite on the phone will likely treat our staff members the same way once he or she is in the restaurant. We don’t play those games. I’m convinced that nice gets nice.
Inside our dining rooms, one basic way we take care of our guests is by providing an atmosphere of comfort and welcome. Controlling noise and designing a thoughtful seating arrangement are effective tools to help us do that. I hear noise the way a good chef tastes salt: too much is overbearing; too little can be stifling. Guests are equally uncomfortable whether they have to shout to be heard or are required to speak in self-concious, hushed tones in order not to have their conversation heard by other tables. With just the right noise level, each table has the luxury of becoming enveloped by its own invisible veil of privacy, allowing animated conversation to flow within that discreet container. Too much noise, on the other hand, aggressively invades the space and interferes with the guests’ ability to engage with one another. It’s annoying, stressful, and inhospitable.
With regard to music, we can control what’s playing and at what volume. We also put a lot of effort into dampening ambient noise with acoustical treatments (for example, hanging draperies, and stapling sound-absorbing fabric to the backs of chairs and to the undersides of tables). We’ve placed acoustic tiles behind walls of wine bottles and applied ceiling and wall treatments wherever they made sense. Because a carpet feels institutional, picks up smells, and is hard to maintain, I am not a fan of most restaurant carpeting. An absorbent floor treatment would solve a lot of noise issues, but purely as a matter of my own taste, our floors are almost always hardwood or terrazzo.
A restaurant’s seating arrangement also contributes mightily to how guests are made to feel throughout their meal and is a potent opportunity to create a social environment. In the design of each of our restaurants we’ve been quite conscious about dividing seating plans as if we were forming several smaller communities within a larger zip code. Walk into any of our restaurants, and you’ll see a series of different dining areas that are meant to make a larger space feel more intimate and more human. That format and scale allows our guests to feel anchored, and it encourages genuine connections between the staff and guests as well as between guests and other guests. After all, beyond cooking your food and doing the dishes, a restaurant must provide a public social environment that distinguishes it from the experience of eating at home.
I’m not pleased when tables are so close together that it’s impossible to have any kind of private conversation with your companions. That’s one of the most inhospitable things a restaurant can do to its guests. It immediately breaks down the imaginary wall of intimacy between tables. For example, when you see a restaurant with banquettes against a long wall, it’s often a design strategy for fitting more people in as efficiently as possible. And to shoehorn in the maximum number of tables, most restaurants choose the narrowest possible tables to line up along the banquette. But in order for all the food ( plus bread and butter, wine bottle, flowers, and salt and pepper) to fit on these very narrow tables, they are often designed to be both very narrow and very long. That puts a guest twice as far from the face of the person he or she came to dine with and twice as close to the ears of strangers at the tables on either side. It’s almost impossible to be intimate with anyone other than the people on either side of you. That’s inhospitable.
With its classic brasserie-like volume of space, we conceived Eleven Madison Park to be a restaurant filled with banquettes. In deciding on table sizes, I asked our architects, Bentel and Bentel, to design every one of the tables along our banquette walls two inches shallower than the standard table (allowing closer, more intimate face-to- face communication), and also to make the tables a bit wider than the standard. The spatial effect is subtle, but significant: in a very grand space that could feel imposing and make our guests feel remote and small, they instead are seated slightly closer than usual to their dining companions and a little farther from their neighbors on either side. That strategy also has the effect of controlling noise throughout the restaurant. In such an arrangement, there is no need to yell to be heard.
A lot of people enjoy being seated at a corner table, so in each restaurant we try to design as many corner tables as possible. Rather than designing a restaurant as one big room, creating subcommunities within each space has the advantage of giving us more corners to work with. For example, Gramercy Tavern has three dining rooms with twelve corner tables. At Eleven Madison Park there are three dining areas with sixteen corner tables. That’s actually a lot of corner tables. Another design goal is to avoid having any “bad” tables. We try to anchor every “deuce” (table for two) to a wall or to a window, and rarely, if ever, float a deuce out in the middle of the dining room. Most deuces are interested in intimacy. A table of five to eight is most often positioned in the center, exerting its gravitational pull on the rest of the dining room. The people at that table have one another as anchors, and are less sensitive about precisely where their table is placed.
The genuine welcome with which we make our first impression while greeting guests is a simple but extremely
powerful statement about our care for them. For any guest, the greeting should provide an immediate affirmative answer to the question: “Are they happy to see me or not?” Guests know when a host is insincere, harried, or just going through the motions in greeting and seating them. It’s not genuine hospitality when the host fails to make eye contact, fails to smile, or fails to thank the guests for coming. It’s also inhospitable when a host rushes ahead of you while showing you to your table, making you feel like a dog being yanked along on a leash. You try to keep up, but inevitably end up trailing several paces behind. It’s all function, with no emotional connection between the host and the guests.
Eye contact tells a guest, “I see you.” A smile is an assurance that you are happy to see the guest. Each is a simple but crucially important nonverbal expression at the very beginning of a dining experience.
It’s a wonderful thing to be in the presence of a host who knows how to establish a warm welcome and natural rapport. The image I have of a guest’s ideal experience with our host is an ongoing sentence that begins with the host’s genuine welcome; continues with the host’s reassuring visit to the table at some point during the meal to let guests know he or she is there if they need anything; and is completed with the punctuation mark of gratitude and an invitation to return to end the sentence as the guest is leaving. If our staff is on its game, guests cannot help feeling that they matter, and that we have taken a true interest in them.
A close examination of our reservation sheets and of our detailed “guest notes” provides our floor managers and hosts with a significant edge in conveying a warm welcome and good-bye. The host may have collected some dots for an effective initial point of contact, such as, “I noticed you came here all the way from Florida. How did you hear about
us?” Or, upon saying thank you and good-bye, the host offers a business card and says, “I hope we’ll get to see you again next time you visit New York. When you’re ready to return, just let me know and I’ll assist with your reservations.”
When guests make reservations online using OpenTable.com, their two most frequent special requests are, “Quiet table, please” or “Romantic table.” Over the years a number of people have called us in advance to let us know they’re planning to propose over dinner. We definitely share that detail with the host and waitstaff. The kitchen can then be ready with a congratulatory dessert plate, and the manager with a bottle of champagne.
Providing exceptional hospitality depends on the alertness and instincts of empathetic staff members. We urge them to develop their own athletic style in actively looking for golden moments of opportunity to go above and beyond.
We truly value our guests’ opinions, whether these opinions are expressed on comment cards or in face-to-face exchanges. But there are many businesses, restaurants included, that don’t really want to learn from such feedback. Their strategy is “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and it sends a message that these businesses aren’t looking for problems and aren’t interested in you. No news is good news.
I’m not pleased when a waiter or host asks a perfunctory “How was everything?” as you’re leaving. You’ll probably say “Fine,” which is exactly what the waiter or host wants to hear. In our restaurants, if the answer is “Fine,” we’ve failed. If our overarching goal is to create a rave for each and every guest experience—“fine” falls short of the mark. Some
variation of “thank you” and “I hope we’ll see you again soon” is more to the point.
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Community
One of the most significant benefits we offer our employees is the opportunity to work for a company that stands for something well beyond serving good food in a comfortable environment. I make it very clear to all new employees that they’ve joined a company that chooses to take an active interest in its community, and that we rely on members of our staff to step up and participate as citizens within that culture. We encourage employees to become involved in the community because doing so makes them even better at taking care of one another and our guests.
And it’s the most effective form of team-building I know. When our colleagues work, serve, and play together beyond the normal confines of work, they invariably return to work knowing each other better and working together more effectively. They become stronger leaders and tighter teammates.
At its best, investing in our community also creates wealth for the community, which in turn often leads to good luck for our own company—something any corporation needs in order to sustain its success. Our good luck spreads goodwill among our stakeholders, making them even prouder and more satisfied to be affiliated with us. By taking active leadership roles in working to revitalize two great city parks that anchor the neighborhoods in which we do business, we’ve demonstrated that a rising tide lifts all boats. This component of enlightened hospitality has beautified our neighborhood, and in turn has enhanced our business.
I am convinced that doing things that make sense for the community leads to doing well as a business. We would never undertake a project in the first place if we didn’t believe it was the right thing to do, or a useful thing to do.
But we also understand that doing good things well brings loads of potential ancillary benefits.
It is in any company’s self-interest to take what it does best and apply that core strength to an appropriate form of outreach beyond its own four walls. For those of us who make a living by nourishing and nurturing guests in our restaurants, there’s a logical connection to feeding people in our community who don’t have enough. Over the years we have hosted or participated in hundreds of hunger-relief events that build on the natural synergy among our staff, other great chefs and restaurants, our guests, and the organizations—most notably Share Our Strength—that share our activist spirit. For years, City Harvest has made regular pickups of our leftover food. It’s natural for us to want to support a rescue agency that annually delivers more than 20 million pounds of food to New York City’s missions and shelters, but we don’t dictate to our staff members what community programs they should or shouldn’t be involved in. We do urge them to play leadership roles in causes that are personally important to them, and we invite them to seek our support. Our hospice dinner program at Beth Israel Hospital, in our neighborhood, was the brainchild of Blue Smoke’s general manager, Mark Maynard-Parisi, who previously had managed at Union Square Cafe. Mark approached me, confident that his idea would fall on eager ears. I told him that conceiving a good idea was one thing and executing it was something else; and I encouraged him to grow as a leader by asking him to persuade all the other GMs and chefs to embrace the idea, which he did. (Mark is now managing partner of Blue Smoke.)
Every Tuesday and Wednesday night, one of our restaurants prepares about twenty dinners for the hospice unit, and volunteers from that restaurant’s staff bring the food to Beth Israel, serving the meals to the hospice patients and their families as well as to the unit’s nurses and attendants. Emotionally, it’s a tough experience to confront people who are steps away from dying. But for our staff to be able to serve others this way, and possibly to put one of life’s last smiles on the faces of the patients and comfort their anguished families, is actually a gift for us. It’s impossible for anyone on our team to serve at the hospice program and not return to work with a far deeper understanding of the true meaning and impact of life and hospitality. (It’s no coincidence that hospice and hospitality share etymological roots.)
Whenever our employees take a leadership role and collect pledges from colleagues in order to participate in an event like the Avon Breast Cancer Walk or the Northeast AIDS Ride, their restaurant matches the money they’ve collected from their colleagues. If an employee asks for our help with a more personal cause (for example, supporting a special school for someone related to an autistic child), we’ll very often say yes. Our restaurants have also pulled together and organized events to raise funds for disaster relief. For example, the catastrophic floods of 1993 that ravaged vast stretches of the Midwest (where I’m from), and an earthquake in western India (where Tabla’s executive chef Floyd Cardoz is from), led us to build instant constituencies and host dinners to raise funds for emergency relief. And in response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, each of our restaurants took a leadership role in a national “dine-out” evening sponsored by Share Our Strength called Restaurants for Relief. We donated a percentage of our revenues to Share Our Strength for its relief work in the Gulf. Additionally, we
invited our employees to contribute a portion of their paychecks to relief. Together we raised $30,000. The program effectively allowed us to join forces with our staff and our guests to make a meaningful community contribution.
Our efforts to connect with and support our neighborhood through the years have paid off both in the community and for our business. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Union Square, now one of the busiest retail destinations in Manhattan. Way back in May 1986, before Union Square Cafe was even open for Saturday lunch, I agreed to host a brunch on behalf of the Union Square Park Community Coalition. The USPCC was a grassroots group seeking to improve quality of life in and around the park— which was then a dangerous place—and to protect the interests of the greenmarket and the historic neighborhood. We designed our menu around ingredients from the greenmarket (this was years before it became the practice of chefs all over New York to buy seasonal produce there), and raised close to $10,000—not a bad figure for those days.
It was a pivotal day for me because the brunch was the very first project that connected me as a citizen to Union Square. The event also proved to be a marketing coup for our restaurant. Attendees responded so favorably to our brunch that within weeks we launched a regular Saturday Greenmarket Brunch. Everything (appetizer, soup, entrée, dessert) was prepared using products from that morning’s greenmarket items.
Union Square has long since become a magnet for the city’s chefs—and for anyone who loves fresh food. To this day, between May and October our chefs and sous-chefs (from each of our restaurants as well as Hudson Yards
Catering) buy between 80 percent and 90 percent of all of our fruit and vegetables at the greenmarket. For years we have conducted tours of the greenmarket for both adults and school-children, and we invite farmers to our morning “market meetings” to discuss their produce before we use it to demonstrate a recipe.
We also support the Union Square community by participating in the annual Harvest in the Square, an event I had a hand in creating. In the 1990s, Rob Walsh, who had been instrumental in first getting me involved in the redevelopment of Union Square Park, came to me with an idea to raise money for the Fourteenth Street–Union Square Business Improvement District and Local Development Corporation. (That name was an impossible mouthful, so Walsh, the organization’s executive director, was commonly called the “mayor of Union Square.” He went on to become New York City’s very effective Deputy Commissioner for Small Business.) The original idea was for a $1,000 sit-down dinner with chefs from the top four or five restaurants in the neighborhood, which at that point was filling up with three- star restaurants. I told Rob, “Why not make it far less exclusive, make it affordable for a lot more people who love the park, and let’s really brand Union Square as the best- tasting neighborhood in the city? And instead of charging
$1,000 to a few, let’s charge $75 to attract as many people from the community as possible. We should get a big tent and make it a walk-around party with a lot more restaurants involved. We can invite the farmers, too, and try to show the restaurants in the neighborhood how easy it is to buy from the greenmarket.”
For an entire decade, the event has been a huge success.
Forty-five neighborhood restaurants participate and nearly 1,500 guests attend, under a huge white tent. The party nets over $100,000 with proceeds used for park
improvements and restoration projects. Just as the Amish perfected the barn raising, Harvest in the Square has become our local “park raising”—a community joining together to care for its own park. The annual party has raised funds that have been used for large capital projects like new park lighting and the addition of ornate iron fencing.
By the late 1980s, my community involvement was limited to serving on the boards of the Union Square Local Development Corporation and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF). The AIWF was a not-for-profit organization founded by Robert Mondavi and Julia Child to educate the masses on the joys of gastronomy. We raised money from culinary events that brought consumers together with producers. I remember organizing a series of ethnic breakfasts—one morning each in Chinatown, in Little India, at a kosher deli, at a Mexican restaurant, and at a good old-fashioned American brunch— to experience and learn how different cultures approached breakfast. We also held microbrew beer tastings (in the days before most people had ever heard the term), wine-and- food dinners, artisanal cheese tastings, champagne dinners, and farmers’ events.
For much of the food-loving public these were heady days of learning, and it was a thrill to be along for the exciting ride at the outset of New York’s culinary revolution. And being there was good for business. The board of AIWF presented excellent networking opportunities among people
—chefs, restaurateurs, consumers, wine makers, journalists, producers, and growers—who were passionate about food.
By attending AIWF’s national conference, I had the chance, very early in my career, to meet all kinds of industry luminaries and develop meaningful relationships that would serve me well in building our business. I have always
believed that networking builds stronger relationships that can lead to good luck for a corporation. But I was putting a lot of my time into AIWF, and it dawned on me that I’d derive even more joy if I could do this for a group that was feeding people in need, and not just educating attendees.
My first chance to engage Union Square Cafe in a philanthropic leadership role came about through serendipity. “Taste of the Nation” was a pioneering benefit organized by Share Our Strength in cities across the United States and Canada. Charging people money to attend a big party where you could walk around to taste small plates from big-name chefs was still a fresh concept in 1989, and when chef Lidia Bastianich of Felidia ristorante invited Union Square Cafe to contribute and serve our food at Taste of the Nation in March 1989, I was flattered and quickly accepted the invitation, knowing it would be a great opportunity to showcase our new chef, Michael Romano.
However, I didn’t appreciate the experience. All of our pre-event planning had been about logistics, with little said about the cause we were supposed to be addressing. It occurred to me during the course of the evening that I didn’t even have any idea what Share Our Strength actually was.
Bon Appétit magazine was the chief sponsor of the event, at Lincoln Center, and, more than an event to raise money to fight hunger, it seemed primarily to be an opportunity for the magazine to throw a top-toque gourmet party to entertain their advertisers. At one point, as I stood over a chafing dish, trying to keep up with scooping food for a long line of guests along with Michael and our sous-chef, Jamie Leeds, I began muttering under my breath, “Who and what are we trying to raise money for here, anyway?”
At that moment, the guest holding her plate out in front of me overheard my impolitic carping. She happened to be
Debbie Shore, who, along with her brother Billy, had founded Share Our Strength in 1984. Debbie brought Billy over and they introduced themselves. Turning over the rocks, in a matter of moments we began connecting dots and I learned that Billy Shore knew both my grandfather Irving Harris and my uncle Bill Harris. Before founding Share Our Strength Billy had worked for Senator Gary Hart of Colorado and later Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, both of whom supported investing in early childhood (zero to three) research and programs, a cause my grandfather and uncle worked for with limitless passion through an organization called KidsPac. My social gaffe—complaining aloud about the event—was about to create one of my life’s most extraordinary learning and leading opportunities.
When I mentioned to Debbie and Billy that I felt their message was not coming through clearly, Debbie said, “You’re absolutely right. More people do need to understand that this is an event to help fight hunger. We’d love to tell you more about it, and we could really use your leadership. Since you obviously want the event to be stronger, you need to be its leader. How about sharing your strength next year?”
For the next two years, I took on the responsibility of chairing New York’s Taste of the Nation, and I loved it. I convinced the city’s best chefs to participate by telling them, “I don’t want you to do this unless you’re fully committed to fighting hunger.” Interestingly, the more chefs I asked not to participate unless they were doing so because they cared about the cause, the more chefs chose to commit themselves. We got World Yacht to contribute use of its largest yacht, the New Yorker, and to let us host a 1,400- person party onboard while cruising out to the Statue of Liberty. We raised ticket prices to $200 and got just about everything donated—food, wine, auction items, design,
flowers, printing. Even the coat checkers contributed their tips to Share Our Strength. We got the right companies to support the cause and raised serious money in the process of getting them to become sponsors. The event turned into a brilliant confluence of gastronomy, commerce, philanthropy, and fun. Having raised $40,000 at the event at Lincoln Center in 1989, Taste of the Nation now raised
$240,000 and then $360,000 in the next two years. It was a stroke of genius when my friend Jim Berrien, then the publisher of Food and Wine (owned by American Express Publishing), asked Schieffelin and Somerset (importers of Möet et Chandon) to sponsor Taste of the Nation. The beverage company agreed to donate $100,000 as well as several cases of Dom Perignon as an inducement for attendees to spend more money to arrive early and gain entrance to the “VIP Dom Perignon Lounge.” Share Our Strength distributed every penny of our revenues to hunger- relief agencies like City Harvest, God’s Love We Deliver, Oxfam International, and Food for Survival, which later became the Food Bank For New York City.
With the help of Jim Berrien and another visionary at American Express, Tom Ryder, I was able to bring Amex on board as a national sponsor, to the tune of $250,000 for each year I chaired the event. In that instance, creating community absolutely led to good luck for Union Square Cafe and me.
But first, the backstory: In the 1980s, Amex had been the dominant charge card for fine dining, especially among those who used it for business entertaining. But by the early 1990s, as a deep recession approached, the company was losing restaurant market share to other credit cards. In no small part, one factor was Amex’s attitude: “You need us, so we’ll charge what we like. Take it or leave it.” American Express had always charged higher “merchant’s
commission” fees than other credit card companies, but now its arrogance was inciting a revolt. In Boston a large group of restaurateurs now threatened to boycott American Express cards in their establishments, dramatically planning to slice up Amex cards with scissors and dump the plastic pieces into Boston Harbor—a new twist on the Boston tea party.
I had my own reasons to feel miffed about American Express’s attitude. The company had a new marketing program called Plus Business. Our local account manager told us that if we agreed to provide discount coupons to cardholders, Amex would drive “plus business” our way— customers who, they claimed, would subsequently spend more money in our restaurant than people using MasterCard or Visa. I couldn’t abide the notion of issuing discount or giveaway coupons at Union Square Cafe. The company’s arrogant approach was making me furious; it implied, “You need this, and if you don’t do it you’re stupid.”
Around that time, I went home to St. Louis for one of my periodic visits to see my father, who was battling lung cancer. I told him I was angry with American Express and that I was considering joining the boycott. He shook his head. “I understand your frustration with their behavior,” he said. “But American Express is a well-established, very successful company that’s not going away for a long time.
They’ve got a lot more muscle than you’ll ever have. And you’re going to lose if you try to fight them.”
But I was young and feisty, my restaurant was packed for every lunch and dinner, and I was feeling my oats.
“But we could make a difference,” I argued. “We’d be fighting alongside a lot of other restaurants.”
“Why don’t you figure out a way to embrace them instead?” my dad urged me. “Maybe they’ll listen to you if they feel like you’re working with them, and not just one more restaurant owner like all the others.”
I could see his point—and I sensed an opportunity to do one of my favorite things, and be a bit of a contrarian. Back in New York I met with Jim Berrien and Tom Ryder—the two friends I had grown to love and admire who ran the magazine publishing side of American Express. I once again told them that I had just attended Share Our Strength’s Conference of Leaders—the annual gathering for its network of Taste of the Nation leaders from across the United States and Canada, many of whom were chefs and restaurateurs. I had been struck by our industry’s passion for helping Share Our Strength fight hunger, and it was clear to me that more and more restaurants were realizing that participating in a Taste of the Nation event was a really smart way to do something good while also making a special connection with their customers. And everyone involved enjoyed it. This community-marketing model seemed the best of all possible worlds.
“The bulk of the American fine-dining industry is up in arms against your company,” I told Jim and Tom. “An amazing way for American Express to re-earn their favor would be to champion a cause that so many chefs and restaurateurs have already shown is very important to them. Now you’re seen only as the company that is charging us all more money and imposing your own marketing desires on us.” I suggested that they find a way for American Express to put serious dollars on the table and become the national title sponsor for Taste of the Nation.
The two men liked the idea, quickly ran it up the corporate flagpole, and succeeded at getting Amex to become the
$250,000 title sponsor. At a time when Taste of the Nation
had no other national sponsors, this was a trailblazing move for American Express. And by finding a way to embrace the huge company when it was down, and when so many others in our industry were reviling it, I became a friend. My father’s advice had been sound. One by one, restaurants across the country took note of the role Amex was playing with SOS, and slowly, but surely, the company began to pick up momentum in rebuilding its relationship with establishments.
Soon thereafter, American Express invited me to do a test radio spot that would be broadcast in the Boston area. They hoped it would defuse the still explosive situation with Boston’s merchants. They assured me that the spot would raise the profile of Union Square Cafe. But mainly they wanted me to tout the Amex card for bringing my restaurant “a higher quality, higher-spending customer than any of the credit cards.”
I said, “No thanks.” That message would sound offensive to those guests of ours who chose to use other charge cards. But I made a counteroffer. “What I would do, and do very proudly,” I said, “is talk about American Express’s incredible generosity in supporting Share Our Strength. For your company to be partnering with our industry for the purpose of fighting hunger is an extraordinary story, one you should be proud of, and I’d be delighted to tell it.”
They looked at me as if I were crazy. A cause-related ad by a big corporation was all but unheard of then. Months went by without a response, and I had just about given up hope of hearing from them when an executive from Ogilvy and Mather called me saying that Amex had scrapped the test radio spot in Boston. Instead, they wanted to launch a national television campaign. It would tell the story of American Express’s work for hunger relief, and they wanted
me to appear in it. I thought about the invitation overnight and phoned in my enthusiastic “yes” the next morning.
The commercial was eventually filmed at Union Square Cafe using a big league production company. We staged a scene of people dining late at night. There was a jazz saxophonist playing in the background. The ad cut back and forth between scenes of people dining at Union Square Cafe and cutaway shots of hungry New Yorkers. I talked about hunger in New York and how Share Our Strength raises money so that leftovers could be delivered to shelters in New York City (there was a scene with a City Harvest truck picking up food). “Because American Express has provided the funding,” I say, “their dollars are actually going to connect food with someone who needs it.”
American Express spent huge amounts of money on the campaign. The commercial reached an enormous audience when it was broadcast during the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993, and again during that year’s Super Bowl. Two-page print ads with my photo ran in the Sunday New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. The campaign marked a pivotal moment for me in appreciating the intersection between business and philanthropy. It conclusively identified Union Square Cafe as doing business in a particular way; and because of the public awareness it created, it raised the stakes by encouraging my team and me to find other ways to do even more to support the community.
My ongoing active affiliation with Share Our Strength as a board member has allowed me to meet some extraordinary thinkers. Billy Shore has always recruited an exceptional roster of board members, staff members, and experts in hunger relief, whose ideas have helped shape how my company continues to work for community outreach. What
helped me to understand Share Our Strength’s work was viewing it as a mutual fund whose expertise was hunger relief. The organization has done all the homework, and has identified the most effective hunger-relief agencies in which to invest. I liked that. I also admired the way it knew how to blend entrepreneurial and not-for-profit cultures. Share Our Strength truly understands how to tap into corporations and encourage profitable, cause-related marketing.
The greatest gift I have received from Share our Strength founder, Billy Shore—beyond his friendship— is his brilliant notion that creating community wealth is the most effective way to achieve lasting social change. Instead of relying exclusively on individuals to make charitable donations or on governments to make grants or subsidies (the two traditional—and
self-limiting—means of fund-raising), Share Our Strength has encouraged the corporate community to create self-sustaining, for-profit businesses and programs that in and of themselves add consumer value, build business, and do the community some lasting good. This creates a virtuous cycle that links the corporate interest in earning profit to the consumers’ desire to affiliate with brands that embrace social causes they believe in.
I’ve often seen this model at work. For several years, Calphalon, the cookware manufacturer, marketed a “Share Our Strength” pot that was sold in department stores. The packaging prominently featured Share Our Strength’s logo, and let the buyer know that $10 of every purchase would go to fight hunger. For customers browsing through the housewares section of a department store, this created a reason to purchase Calphalon’s pan rather than any of fifteen other brands. If the buyer didn’t already think the
Calphalon pan was best, here was another outstanding reason to buy it: “When I cook for myself, I’m going to help feed somebody else. Why wouldn’t I want to support a brand that does that?” The promotion spurred lively retail activity; Calphalon made more money on sales; and for its percentage, Share Our Strength received close to $250,000 annually.
In the late 1990s the organic yogurt producer Stonyfield Farm used its plastic container lids to promote Share Our Strength. Stonyfield’s founder, Gary Hirshberg, viewed each container lid as a miniature billboard to be used for messages promoting causes he believed were important.
Stonyfield’s commitment to use its lids to promote the work of Share Our Strength led me to select its product as the main ingredient for our yogurt-based raita when we opened Tabla in 1998. We identified it on our menu (“Stonyfield Farm raita”) and, in return, Tabla got a discount on purchases of the yogurt. It was good business and a satisfying affiliation for both companies.
As I learned with Union Square Park, it’s essential to create programming that gives people good reasons to use a park. For that reason, we selected Madison Square Park as the site for our annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party (BABBP), held over a weekend in mid-June just a couple of blocks from Blue Smoke. For this ’cue-lovers’ event, we invite ten of the country’s leading barbecue chefs to visit New York and cook their award-winning barbecue right in the middle of Manhattan. In 2006, nearly 110,000 barbecue fans attended BABBP during the two-day event, and devoured over 5,000 pounds of brisket, three dozen whole hogs, and close to 10,000 pounds of ribs. Beyond attracting so many people to enjoy two days of food and music in the park, BABBP makes a contribution from its revenues to the Madison Square Park Conservancy, and in its first three
years it raised $140,000 for the organization, which in turn plowed the money into horticulture, and more programming (sculpture, music concerts, performances for kids, readings, and so on).
Because our company is committed to community outreach week after week, year after year, we’ve also been able to recruit a different kind of employee over time.
Certain people are drawn to work for us because of this reputation. The person for whom this stuff is exciting tends also to be someone who intuitively cares about making other people happy. That is what hospitality is all about.
In the hours and days after 9/11, it was quite natural to question the significance of one’s own life role or profession. I know I was asking myself, “After all this, who really cares about restaurants?” Quickly, though, I answered my own doubts. In their ability to nourish and nurture, and to provide a buoyant place for human beings to be with one another, and to smile, restaurants—as a healing agent—seemed more relevant than ever.
The collective experience of 9/11 caused the entire city to put down differences and pull together as never before. At that time I was the chairman of the Restaurant Committee for NYC and Company, the city’s tourism marketing organization, and in the first weeks after 9/11 we met practically every day. At first, we tried to figure out what we could do for the rescue workers and for the bereaved families. Next, we tried to figure out what we could do for our community of restaurants, many of which were empty and in financial jeopardy. The downtown restaurant community especially was paralyzed. As far north as our Union Square–Gramercy Park–Madison Square neighborhood, one could smell the acrid, burning rubble for two months after the towers fell.
It was especially gratifying that in a crisis of this magnitude, the greatest strength of the hospitality industry expressed itself. By following their natural instincts, New York’s chefs and restaurants, including the members of our own team, knew exactly how to play a special role in aiding and comforting other New Yorkers.
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Suppliers
These days, more and more people want to do business with a company in whose business principles they believe, not just with a company whose roast chicken and creamy polenta they find delicious. We’re the same way when choosing suppliers. At the outset, we make our own business values and goals very clear, and we try to understand theirs. We look for common ground, and we put a premium on integrity. We’re looking for enlightened companies whose teams consist of “51 percenters” who are passionate about what they do. Just as we ask our employees to join us in community outreach programs, we admire suppliers who do so.
We express care for our fourth core group—our network of purveyors and vendors—by building loyal, mutually respectful relationships and by seeking win-win transactions. The most fundamental way we accomplish this is by doing what we say we’re going to do. If we strike a deal for certain payment terms, we honor it. Saying what we will do implies an agreement to also say what we cannot do. If unforeseen circumstances arise—a compressor breaks, for instance, requiring a large cash outlay for repairs—and we unexpectedly cannot meet our obligations to a supplier, we need to be absolutely upfront and ask the supplier’s permission to work out an alternative solution.
Not long ago we made a shift in several of our restaurants from Evian bottled water to Fiji. Primarily, this was because I had heard from more and more of our chefs, staff members, and guests that they preferred the taste of Fiji, which they said “seemed wetter,” more effectively quenched their thirst, and had a less “oily” texture than Evian.
I had insisted on using Evian for years, out of loyalty as well as for emotional reasons. The first time I had ever seen bottled water was when my family took me on my inaugural trip to France when I was seven years old. I kept a bottle of Evian next to my bed at night and loved snapping its plastic cap on and off. I grew up associating Evian with the adventure of traveling to France, as well as with memories of dining in excellent restaurants there, and so we began serving it. In fact, I’d credit Evian with playing an important supporting role in the legitimization of fine dining in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Restaurants that wanted to be taken seriously carried Evian. It was like having a French stamp of authenticity and approval.
Second, through Audrey’s role in advertising sales for Gourmet magazine, we became quite friendly with some terrific people at Evian, one of her accounts. Evian’s CEO, David Daniel; and his successor, Mark Rodriguez, were both brilliant market-builders and ambassadors for their brand. I always felt intensely loyal to them. Through those relationships, I helped persuade Evian to sponsor Share Our Strength’s Taste of the Nation events, using the same logic that had earlier convinced American Express. For several years, Evian was spending approximately $500,000 each year to help Share Our Strength fight hunger and to reach their target fine-dining audience. If all things were equal in terms of product quality and pricing, Evian’s commitment to
Share Our Strength had given them an edge with me (and others in my industry) over any erstwhile competitor.
But in later years, Evian had undergone significant changes in management leadership and distribution; with direction from its French management, the company had started to retrench in its sponsorship of Share Our Strength, cutting back its financial contributions as well as its overall marketing commitment to the fine-dining community by eliminating a large part of its consumer advertising budget. It was no coincidence that now, for the first time, I was open to hearing the enthusiastic comments about Fiji’s quality; and three of our restaurants made the change. Before doing so, however, I felt obliged to call a manager at Share Our Strength to help ascertain any potential conflicts. “I want to make sure that this move on our part will in no way cause Evian to further remove its support and undermine your fight against hunger.”
“They’ve already been diminishing their financial support,” the manager said. “You should do whatever you need to do for your business, but thanks for caring enough to ask.”
When we interviewed Fiji, we asked: “Will you join us in supporting causes that are important to us and our community? We’ll ask you only when we think it will actually help your business.” Their answer was resoundingly positive.
Fiji came on board, and in 2004 we asked the company to become a sponsor of our annual Autumn Harvest dinner for SOS, an event Evian had cosponsored for years. Again, out of loyalty to our relationship, we asked ourselves if we should invite Evian one last time. We decided not to. But Fiji then asked if it could donate just product, not money.
(Sponsors generally contribute both.) We were very honest: “Evian has sponsored us historically with both product and dollars. We made a conscious decision not to go back to them because it might be uncomfortable now that we have Fiji at Eleven Madison Park”—that was where the Autumn Harvest dinner was held. “But we can’t ask you to do less than Evian did. That wouldn’t be fair to Evian, or to Share Our Strength.” Fiji, fortunately, found the cash.
This isn’t business as usual; most businesses ordinarily just go with the best supplier that offers the best price. Of course pricing is an important calculation; but for us, excellence, hospitality, and shared values must also be prominent factors in the selection process. It’s hard for me to imagine deriving so much pleasure from the restaurant business were it not for the important and enjoyable relationships we’ve had with our suppliers. And the range of those relationships is broad: greenmarket farmers, wine producers, meat suppliers, kitchen repair people, cheese mongers, printers, graphic designers. The enthusiasm with which we approach each day is infused with a deep respect for how well we represent those people who have supplied us with the tools to succeed.
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Investors
It’s not natural for a young child to be inclined to share.
Until we were taught by parents and teachers about the importance of sharing, none of us wanted to do it. Sharing something important to us with someone else always meant that there would be less of it for us. With patience, maturity, and practice at the art of negotiating and compromise, most of us eventually learned that sharing a toy, a candy bar, or even a friend could actually enrich the experience of life.
Less of something for us now could ultimately yield more.
That’s the way it is when you choose to take on investors for your business. I suppose if I had all the money in the world, I might choose to own 100 percent of the risk and the financial returns. But I’ve learned over time that while the child in me may want the pie all to myself, the wisest thing I can do in my own self-interest is to share pieces of that pie with others. By selling or even giving away some pieces, I’ve never given up having control in preparing the recipe, but I have always ended up with a bigger, better-tasting pie.
For that reason, in each of my businesses I have chosen to share ownership with managing partners who can earn and purchase a slice of the pie through their hard work and their excellent, effective adherence to our business values. Ethics, loyalty, longevity, and the highest possible leadership skills also count for a lot. These are leaders who have helped make others on our team successful, whose judgment mirrors my own, and who, above all, are on my side. There’s nothing original about my discovery that a business stands a better chance at thriving when an ownership point of view is present. Clearly, had I chosen not to share equity with leading managers, I would have diminished my own opportunities to expand our business, and shortchanged the potential of each of the restaurants within my company.
As our company has grown, it has done so with the benefit of funding from an array of sources. I’ve never done a deal without investing a sizable amount of my own funds. If I’m not willing to make a personal bet on the successful outcome of a project, why should I expect anyone else to do so? Additionally, I welcome and encourage investments from my managing partners. It gives comfort and confidence to an outside investor—whether it’s a bank, an organization, or an individual—to know that those of us charged with running the business have our own “skin” in
the game. Beginning with my first restaurant investment at Union Square Cafe, I invited a few close relatives to join me in taking on the financial risk of opening a new restaurant. I had no track record as an entrepreneur, and their faith in me was clearly an act of love and support more than a reasoned investment. Fortunately, the restaurant’s performance exceeded our expectations, and 100 percent of those investors subsequently chose to come along for the ride at Gramercy Tavern.
It wasn’t until the simultaneous openings of Eleven Madison Park and Tabla—at the collective cost of more than
$11 million—that I actually needed to solicit significant additional outside funding just to get the places built and open. With some trepidation I went first to my grandfather, who was then eighty-eight years old and whom I hadn’t invited to invest in either of my first two restaurants. His response was characteristically direct and tough: “I’m in a position where I could take on the entire piece of the investment you’re talking about, but I’m not going to do it. You need to find other, nonfamily people to buy into your plans. You need to know whether this is actually a good investment. Family members alone won’t tell you. When you find other support, come tell me and we’ll discus it further.”
I was deflated. Why was he making this so unnecessarily complicated? I turned to a very small group of friends whose combination of financial wherewithal, sharp business acumen, and longtime loyalty to me made them seem like excellent candidates. I explained that these would be long- term investments, and that the time until payback— assuming the restaurants were winners and survived— would be lengthy. We’d be spending quite a lot to build the restaurants, and would be further delaying any return on their investment by taking a necessary leadership role in the revitalization of the park and neighborhood right outside
the front door of the restaurants. These restaurants were the kind that might one day become New York institutions. At that point, they’d also provide a solid financial return—we hoped. For any rational investor, from a purely financial standpoint the time frame for this investment was only mildly attractive lined up against any number of other possibilities.
Despite that, the funding flowed in. People trusted me and my management team, and were above all pleased with the opportunity to affiliate themselves with our new restaurants and with our existing approach to the restaurant business. They also believed in the investments as a solid long-term play.
I’ve repeated that model with each subsequent business and have accepted that my grandfather’s advice was sage. By taking on the right kind of outside investors, we’ve not only given our business the fuel necessary to grow, but enlarged our spheres of information, advice, wisdom, contacts, and influence. The fiduciary responsibility I feel toward our investors (both managing partners and outside investors) has also sharpened my own discipline as a businessman to provide a healthy, sustainable return on their investment.
Investors are a crucial link in the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality. Without trusting, satisfied, confident investors we cannot continue to grow, and therefore cannot provide opportunities for those members of our staff who are ready to grow. Nor can we reinvest in and re-up the kind of operational excellence that made them want to be associated with our restaurants in the first place. Our investors understand—and believe—that by taking their place in line behind our other chief stakeholders, they stand an even better chance to reap sound, ongoing financial
rewards. They are buying into a business whose employees, customers, community, and suppliers have been given good reason to support our success. From the moment I first went into business, I was far more focused on excellence and hospitality than on profitability. Today, earning a profit is still not the primary destination for my business, but I know that it is the fuel that drives everything else we do. Whether you call it enlightened hospitality or enlightened self-interest, it’s the safest and surest business model I know.
